But it does not make sense to push your own agenda about unionization, which is the worst thing happened in US private/public sector. Unionization basically kills the key reason why a corporate can make money: free labor market.
Unionization is no different from giving someone else control over your paycheck. Just as there are narcissistic bosses there are mafia-like unions and, in both cases, you're not going to know until it's too late. The benefit of the tech industry is that there's always a market for it and there are low barriers to entry. Programmers can vote with their feet. This isn't the 1950s. There are millions of choices for tech workers today that aren't street-sweeping or working for Big Blue.
> Giving someone unvested RSUs with no voting rights, in third class stock isn't meaningful.
Vested RSUs turn people into millionaires overnight. If that isn't meaningful to you, there are plenty of actors in Los Angeles that would trade their union cards for your stock.
> The capital class couldn't care less about you the person writing code or managing a team or building pipelines or maintaining dbs. Am I the only one that remembers Office Space?
The lesson I got from Office Space was that working as a spreadsheet-filling accountant was boring and soul crushing. Little to do with tech per se. In fact, what liberated the protagonists from their drudgery was one of the character's knowledge of finance and programming. Tech, in addition to managerial incompetence and a building fire, saved them.
Most people would do anything to have the privilege to work at a company like Twitter. Even with insane productivity standards that Musk demands. People grind their bodies for way less and non-meaningful labor work. Here you get an opportunity to gain skills and competence which you can immediately use as your career progresses.
There is a reason why unionising hasn't caught up in Tech. Firstly most employees don't stay long enough for any meaningful thing to happen. But beyond that, unions just transfer your responsibility to career managers, who have no stake in seeing you do good in real way. Sure they might negotiate a little better pay and benefits. But they have 0 interest in making you truly better, like better skilled, educated and trained on the longer run. Which has more potential to unlock better opportunities.
In fact competent employees run contrary to the goals of a union. This is for several reasons. They threaten the existing leadership structure of the union, and if that isn't the case, they are likely to move jobs and that means one less paying employee for the union structure.
>Vested RSUs turn people into millionaires overnight.
So do lottery tickets - your odds are about the same too
>The benefit of the tech industry is that there's always a market for it and there are low barriers to entry. Programmers can vote with their feet. This isn't the 1950s. There are millions of choices for tech workers today that aren't street-sweeping or working for Big Blue.
"I have enough options so I do not feel any sense of responsibility to support my coworkers against a structurally imbalanced system"
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but your response is almost precisely the point people make with the misquoted phrase:
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
More nuance to that quote here: https://hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com/post/23486952183/com...
I'm doing the opposite of advocating for a crab bucket. What I'd like is for every capable individual to pursue their own self-interest to their highest ability, while still being able to preserve their individual liberty of contract.
Unions are built on seniority systems and care little for quality or merit. Many go so far as deny non-unionized coworkers the right to individually represent themselves (see Janus v. AFSCME). The union does not value individual skill. In general, it values the will of the collective, and, in particular, it's most vocal and demanding representatives.
I would have no issue with people choosing to be part of a union as an organization of like-minded compatriots willing to subject themselves and only themselves to said union's terms. After all, whether to one's advantage of detriment, every person has freedom of association. Such an arrangement is similar to a startup.
However, unions in the US rely on the imposition of the government's police power. They're essentially state-backed special interest groups. That they are political institutions in their own right should have anyone who values his liberties concerned at the very least.
> So do lottery tickets - your odds are about the same too
The chances of winning 1 million dollars in a semi-weekly game of Powerball are 1 in 11,688,054. All things being equal, that's roughly 14 people for every employed person in the US. Meaning that in a given year ~5,824 Powerball winners (not including the Jackpot) can be expected to be millionaires before taxes. Compare that with the millions of tech workers with six figure salaries + RSUs.
> "I have enough options so I do not feel any sense of responsibility to support my coworkers against a structurally imbalanced system"
Firstly, I never made any personal claims about my own life. Whether I do or don't have options has no bearing on the fact the others do. This can be observed from the record low unemployment rate. And even where there are layoffs, the 3-month severance packages pay more than most American's annual incomes.
Secondly, I don't know of any system that isn't structurally at some level. Economics is the science of satisfying unlimited wants with limited resources. Employment, in the same vein, are subject to supply and demand, not balance or equilibrium. The only way to achieve the latter is to limit individual rights and deny them from wanting more than is supplied.
Thirdly, tech is where that Steinbeck quote breaks. Unlike the farmers and fruit-pickers in Grapes of Wrath, tech employees actually have a very good chance of becoming millionaires so long as they aren't spendthrifts. At a starting pay of ~3x the median income of the country, even before RSUs, I'd hesitate to call anyone in that position "poor" or "temporarily embarrassed" in a financial sense.
Being a millionaire is only “powerful” if there are people in poverty. If poverty didn’t exist, then being a millionaire wasn’t actually going to be that big of an increase in life quality.
We should seek to cancel out rent seeking behavior. The thing I hate about our economy is the amount of momentum money gives others while actively holding others back. If our economy was truly based around your abilities it wouldn’t be so annoying.
However, we should also remember that not everyone can work, but everyone deserves a high quality life in line with our powerful economy.
Everyone wants to decouple labor and life, when the actual way to do that is to merge capital and labor such that there are no people who aren't part owner.
The existence of billionaires means that at some point there was an unethical decision made to hold onto power and wealth instead of distributing it to employees
Isn't that whole point of being rich? You are better than the others?
There is an always a stack rank, whether we like to agree with this or not. Any attempts to flatten the hierarchy only leads to the mess we saw in the last century.
People like to get rewarded for being better than the rest.
I guess you have never been to a socialist country?
This article has a quote from a California Lottery spokesman saying 138 people won a million+ in 2021: https://patch.com/california/orange-county/californias-top-1....
This article also from 2021 estimates 7000+ millionaires from 35 bay area IPOs that year: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/technology/silicon-valley...
When you factor in the number of lottery tickets sold each year vs the number of people working for startups, and the fact that at a startup you do have at least some degree of control over the outcome (that's part of the reason you would take the job), it seems like the lottery comparison is pretty far from correct in reality.
It's crazy to me that our profession fights unionization despite repeated, predictable and consistent anti-worker, antisocial, narcissistic, ego driven companies that grind us up and spit us out
Giving someone unvested RSUs with no voting rights, in third class stock isn't meaningful.
Being employee 10 of $tartup doesn't matter anymore, because the company raised their D round in a down round which wiped out every Angel Investor and any common stock holders. Luckily the new Saudi backed VC fund that did the round is going to make sure that the CEO is doing their "most important job" of serving the Board and protecting investors over the expendable employees
The capital class couldn't care less about you the person writing code or managing a team or building pipelines or maintaining dbs.
Am I the only one that remembers Office Space?